Anime, games, and anime games

After an inexplicably good summer, 2015 seems like it’s so far an okay year for anime. It’s not terribly horrible like, say, 2010, and it’s certainly better than 2014, for what that’s worth. And this season does look pretty good, but I said the same thing somewhere on the webs back in Spring and we all know how that turned out. But that is in the past! Surely my optimism will not jinx this season!Continue reading →

First, sorry for the extreme delay in recent posts. I’m quite… ah… busy with real life stuff that I thought would be sorted out way earlier but it turns out that you do have to be through in sorting shit out if you don’t want it to come back to bite you in the ass.

Second, I’ll make some changes to the format of both monthly and season roundups. For monthly roundups, I’ll only be including three shows per section, to make this much more bearable.Continue reading →

In more ways than one, watching the first two episodes of Ushio and Tora is kind of like going back to 1993. After all, this is one of the seminal shonen works that have influenced all action shonens ever since; the amount of battle shonens that don’t borrow at least a little bit from this series can be counted on one hand. But, it’s been almost 20 years since it ended. Can it still stand out and connect with me? Does it have enough substance to stand the test of time?

Well, I think that my praise for Ranpo Kitan‘s mystery was a bit too early and lo and behold, I was wrong about the mystery. In this episode, it just kind of… fizzled out without much in the way of a satisfactory conclusion to it. But at the same time, it was… certainly something special. I don’t know if the “good” special like GARO: The Animation or the “bad” kind of special. At least it wasn’t boring.

I’m not particularly unbiased towards this series because, as a whole, I love survival games. After all, they’re all about simulating battles minus the gory wounds and limb loss and other icky things that happen in real battles with real guns that have pointy bullets. What is real are the thrills; to be in a survival game is to feel truly alive and strengthen (or, more realistically, destroy) friendships.